The present invention relates to wireless communications and related devices, and, more particularly, to methods systems and computer program products for collecting telemetry data.
As the popularity of mobile terminals increases, manufacturers of these devices strive to provide popular models to increase sales to the marketplace. The most popular models of mobile terminals are sometimes feature intensive. These features may include, for example, multiple ring tones and touch tones, one touch dialing, voice activated dialing, calculators, games, calendars, address books and the like. The more feature intensive the mobile terminal, the more complicated the menus used to access and/or utilize the features become. Furthermore, the memory and programming capabilities required to provide these features may become burdensome.
Attempts to determine which features mobile users access the most, typically include such things as mall surveys or comment cards filled out when mobile terminals and/or accessories are purchased. This information may not be abundant due, for example, to the fact that these types of surveys are rarely popular among consumers. Furthermore, the surveys that get completed may be inaccurate. Therefore, this information is not typically reliable enough to use to modify the features of the mobile terminals and the service provided. Accordingly, it is difficult to obtain feedback on the actual field performance of mobile terminals. This feedback may be useful to manufacturers in their decision to continue and/or discontinue different features built into the mobile terminal and may provide useful performance information that service providers could utilize to provide cost effective calling plans.